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Winner of the 2016 Spur Award for Best Western Historical Nonfiction Novel

William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest

"The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction remarkable life of William Wells has found an ideal biographer in novelist-turned-historian William Heath. This deeply researched reconstruction of Wells’ side-shifting odyssey brilliantly illuminates the confusing choices and challenges that confronted Indians and pioneers as they struggled against one another and with themselves on the early American frontier."
—Stephen Aron, author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay

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Conversations with Robert Stone

Stone’s reputation rests on his mastery of the craft of fiction. These interviews are replete with insights about the creative process as he responds with disarming honesty to probing questions about his major works. Stone also has fascinating things to say about his remarkable life—a schizophrenic mother, a stint in the navy, his involvement with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, and his presence at the creation of the counterculture. From the publication of A Hall of Mirrors until his death in 2015, Stone was a major figure in American literature.
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About

William Heath has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Case Western Reserve University and has taught at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, and the University of Seville. In 2007 he retired as a professor emeritus at Mount Saint Mary’s University, where The William Heath Award in creative writing is given annually. The Walking Man (Icarcus Books 1994) is a selection of his finest poems. The Children Bob Moses Led (Milkweed Editions 1995) won the Hackney Literary Award for best novel, was nominated by the publisher for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, and by Joyce Carol Oates for the Ainsfield-Wolf Award. In 2002 Time magazine online judged it one of the eleven best novels of the African American experience. Blacksnake’s Path: The True Adventures of William Wells (Heritage Books, 2008) was a History Book Club selection. Devil Dancer (Somondoco Press 2013) is a neo-noir novel set in Lexington, Kentucky. His most recent work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest, (University of Oklahoma Press 2015), won two Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America for best Nonfiction History book and best first Nonfiction History book. His edition of Conversations with Robert Stone will be published by the University of Mississippi Press in 2016. William Heath has published essays on Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, William Styron, and Thomas Berger, among others. He and his wife Roser Caminals-Heath, a Catalan novelist, have lived in Frederick, Maryland since 1981.